A Case for Increased Operating System Support in Chip Multi-Processors

The performance of computer systems has scaled well due to a synergistic combination of technological advancement and architectural improvement. The authors identify the operating system as one area where a novel architecture could significantly improve on current Chip Multi-Processor (CMP) designs, allowing increased performance and improved power efficiency. They first show that the operating system contributes a non-trivial overhead to even the most computationally intense workloads and that this OS contribution grows to a significant fraction of total instructions when executing interactive applications.